HowIt Works 071
DID YOU KNOW? Hubble only shoots in black and white, with scientists adding colour to simulate what we might see
APPROACHING PLUTO
HUBBLE’S
BUBBLE
In the closest-ever encounter with Pluto, 12,500 kilometres above the
surface, this image was taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Its
cameras were able to zoom in to show us the most detailed view we have
of Pluto’s surface. The terrain could be compared to some of the rocky
landscapes found on Earth, as mountains seen in this image reach as high
as 3,500 metres. Looking closely at the pale areas in shot, slabs of
methane ice add to the dwarf planet’s snakeskin appearance.Taken in 2016, Hubble’s first
image of a complete nebula
showed a balloon bursting with
colour in astonishing detail.
This image was the third
attempt at a photo; the first
suffered from blurriness and
the second didn’t have a wide
enough field of view. However,
the end result was definitely
worth the wait.
The bright star seen inside
the bubble, slightly left of the
image centre, is creating this
immense sphere. Using its
strong winds of radiation, the
star, which is betwween ten
and 20 times the mass of our
Sun, blows the surrounding
clouds of space dust outwards
around it. This bubble is heated
by radiation, producing this
sphere of contrasting colour.© NASA© AlamyCOLOUR CLUSTER
It’s not often you get to see 100,000 stars in one place. But in this
photograph, taken by the Hubble Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3, they
come together in a striking panoramic assortment of reds, oranges and
blues. What you are looking at here is a section of the Omega Centauri
star cluster – home to 10 million stars. Aged between 10 and 12 billion
years old, they shine 16,000 light years away from us.
The colour diversity signifies the different stages of life the stars are
in: yellow-white dots show stars at the stage of hydrogen fusion – the
stage that our Sun is currently in – the orange dots are older stars that
are cooler and larger in the sky, red dots are red giants while the blue
dots are nearing the end of their lives, their hydrogen exhausted, the
stars now fusing helium to emit most of their light in ultraviolet
wavelengths. Some stars appear to be almost touching, though the
distance between any two stars in the image is about a third of a light
year. If Earth was placed within this star cluster, our night skies would be
about 100 times brighter.© NASAEYES IN THE SKY
When galaxies collide, they sometimes merge
into one supergalaxy, in the case of these two
galaxies creating a pair of eyes in the sky.
NGC 2207 and IC 2163 have been together for
around 40 million years. Grappling with each
other as huge gravitational forces act on the star
systems within, these two galactic eyes will one
day combine into a single large eye.The reds and greens incorporated into this
image resemble a mask that could belong to
some sort of supervillain, but this colour scheme
is the work of two telescopes. NASA’s Spitzer
Space Telescope contributed the infrared data
forming the majority of the red, while visible data
from NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope
captured the blues and greens.© NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/Vassar